


better than nothing

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alcohol, Drugs, Good times, Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, POV Second Person, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 06:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6227389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Try and look alive, Parrish,” Kavinsky tells you, somehow knowing how to speak in the trough of every overworked soundwave, “We’re going to have fun tonight.” He pulls up at a red light and slides his fingers under your jaw, tilting your face up to him to make sure you can see the greedy curl of his lips. </p><p>Or, AU where Adam fell in with Kavinsky instead of Gansey</p>
            </blockquote>





	better than nothing

**Author's Note:**

> [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) gave me the idea for this (I mean, I stole it from one of her WIPs haa) and graciously let me use it, she is The Best.

It’s been a long time since the thrum of a heavy race car pulling up behind you made you panic. These days it’s not quite a comfort, but it’s something close. You drop the kickstand of your bike, burying your annoyance at how smooth and functional the thing is now, and turn to greet them; Kavinsky driving, Jiang shotgun, at least two others lolling in the backseat. Discordant bass tumbles through the open window, one of the songs that you’ve come to like through mere exposure, and there is a delighted, drunken chorus of “ _Parrish!”_ when the Evo stops beside you.

“Hey,” you say, dropping your elbows onto the window frame, “Are we doing something?”

“No,” Kavinsky tells you through a lazy breath of smoke. “Come with.”

“I’ll drop off my bike.” You ignore Kavinsky’s yell that he’ll just make you a new one, and wheel it down your driveway, glad you were already so close to home. Behind you, the engine revs, and then roars off, but you’re mostly sure that Kavinsky’s just killing time and he’ll circle back to you. At least he’s not following you home.

You tried to prevent Kavinsky from learning where you lived, but when he’s interested in someone he’s the worst kind of spy. He watches with a hunter’s patience, hungrily for new crumbs of information, minutia and trivia, everything he can use, and later, use against. His focus is a terrifying thing, too sharp to be held, and the only thing you could think to fight it with was the mundane truth. You told him where you lived, and you told him not to go to your actual house because there’s nothing to interest him, and because you don’t think he and your father would ever be able to walk away with one still alive.

It seems enough to satisfy him, though you never escape the dull, sick feeling that one day it won’t be. You chain your bike up around back, studiously avoiding catching your mother through the twitching curtain as you walk back out to the road. You’re tired from work, but not enough to sleep, and closing yourself up in the double-wide seems like it would be a slow, stifling death. Instead you walk towards the last smear of ruddy pink in the sky, crushed between looming clouds and distant mountains, and roll your shoulders as you reach the road. Unencumbered by your bike and bags, the world feels so open.

The evening calm is shaken apart by the return of the Evo’s ravenous engine and its blaring synthesisers. “Backseat, Jiang,” Kavinsky orders, and you take his place in the passenger seat.

You get to sit shotgun because you occasionally say useful things, about navigation or construction or police roadblocks. It might even be a kindness, sparing you from the back seat, since it’s no secret that you don’t like being jammed in between Skov and Swan while the sun’s still up. Proko’s absent, and you wish he wasn’t, even though the crowd in the car would be even worse with him. Kavinsky dangles a hand out the window, the bassline takes over your heartbeat, and someone from the back smacks you on the shoulder when you close your eyes.

“Try and look alive, Parrish,” Kavinsky tells you, somehow knowing how to speak in the trough of every overworked soundwave, “We’re going to have fun tonight.” He pulls up at a red light and slides his fingers under your jaw, tilting your face up to him to make sure you can see the greedy curl of his lips. Swan whistles, Skov snickers, and you knock Kavinsky’s hand off with an angry jerk of your chin. A second later and the light’s green, and his only interest is trying to push the speedometer’s needle off the dial.

The thing is, you hate him. You hate him with a low ache in your chest that beats all the louder every time he does something careless and violent and proves you right. You hate him in a way that twists up inside you whenever he looks at you for too long, forces you to face yourself mirrored in his shades, in a way that keeps you up if he hasn’t given you something to sleep. You hate him so much it’s threatening to loop around into something else, and that just makes you hate him more.

And the thing is that he doesn’t _care._ It’s some incredible joke to him and the rest of his pack that you despise them, and they keep you with them anyway, dragging you along in their wake and you go, every time they ask, you go. You seek them out. You decided a long time ago you’d rather be seething in company than sulking without.

It’s easy to ignore in the moment, though. You can pick apart every fractured piece of your own heart in your quiet moments, but with his music loud enough to drown out your thoughts and his smoke filling your lungs, it’s impossible. You’re part of the pack, criminal by association, and it is amazingly _easy_ to just let them surge around you. This is the kind of thing they should warn you about in school; when you have been worn down to nothing, when you only have one feeling and that feeling is ‘tired’, you are easy prey for boys who will take you as-is and do all the work of driving you to trouble.

“Where are we headed?” Jiang asks, and you roll your eyes because these days Kavinsky’s only ever headed one place. It’s not enough to have five of you at his beck and call, no, he needs Lynch as well. Maybe you should tell Kavinsky that it’s never going to work. Maybe you should tell Lynch that everything he does looks like flirting back. You let your arm fall out the window instead, watch the road streak past below, try not to hate yourself for not being enough. Of course you aren’t. You’re one of the gang, not a raging, irresistible tempest like Lynch. You should be grateful you’ve got friends at all.

They’re the ones that found you, one month into Aglionby. People like Kavinsky are always good at sniffing out loneliness, a beacon like blood in shark-infested water. But loneliness marks out more than plain weakness, and he gave you something like a test; the five of them caught you in an empty hall and Skov’s fist cracked across your cheek. But the polished smell of old wooden boards was a universe away from dirt and summer heat, and it stopped the world from splintering down to the burst of pain on your face.

You didn’t hit them back. You set your shoulders and forced your breathing to stay calm, and you gave them the look that said in five years you would be invincibly rich and out to settle grudges. The look that said your Henrietta dust coating was misleading, that you should be striped in clashing red and violet, a creature born to violence and more than able to contain it.

Four of them had looked surprised in face of how viciously you burned. Kavinsky had grinned.

You find Lynch at a red light, passenger side in Gansey’s venomously orange Camaro. Against your will, you find yourself leaning forward to watch. Lynch is chewing on his wristbands like an animal, but spits them out when he sees Kavinsky, cocking his head with cool interest. Beside him, you see Gansey’s knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. To Lynch, Kavinsky might as well be sitting in an empty car, but Gansey looks past him to you, and your neck prickles. Richard Gansey is a supernova, so bright he’s hard to look at, who speaks to you with clipped, polite words and clear distaste since you fell in with Kavinsky. Ever so casually, you let your gaze drop to the dash, hating your cheeks for burning.

Kavinsky presses down on the gas, lets the Mitsubishi cry his call to arms for him. You can’t quite hear Lynch’s words to Gansey, but you don’t need to hear them to know what he’s saying. Begging to engage. There’s no question that they’d win. The only thing it comes down to is Gansey’s principals, and you are willing to bet _those_ would survive a direct nuclear blast.

When the light goes green, the Camaro pulls away at an insultingly mild thirty. Kavinsky hisses between his teeth, and shouts slurs out after them, slamming down on the accelerator until the Camaro’s a speck on the horizon and then nothing at all. Not out of mind, though. From the bitter grind of Kavinsky’s teeth, you know you’re all in for a night now.

“Don’t mind those fags,” Skov says.

Kavinsky puts his cigarette out on Skov’s knee.

You end up at the fairgrounds, his deserted and destructible playground, all of you piling out of the car to examine the wreckage of the last party. Kavinsky orders someone to summon Prokopenko, and everyone else they know. It’s going to be one of _those_ nights, and reluctance to sleep wars briefly with the weight settled into your bones.

He notices. “Need a pick up, Parrish?” he asks, and his shades make his eyes hollow against Henrietta’s night. You lean back against the Evo, trying to think it through, but Kavinsky’s already got something in hand, one of his creations, and you already know you need it.

Usually, you’ll accept just enough to take the edge off. Kavinsky promises batches that won’t cook your brain, little purple pills that slide too easily over your tongue any night when you can’t sleep. It’s a chemical wall in your head cutting you off from everything pressing down on you, it’s freeing and alarming and wonderful and worrying, and you only take them on the nights when you’re afraid you’ll claw your way out of your skin if you don’t. The last thing you could ever need is dependence on Kavinsky.

But you can’t make it through one of Kavinsky’s parties sober, and no one else counts being out of your head with sleep deprivation as an altered state. You part your lips, just a fraction, let his thumb push something small and chalky into your mouth, but even after you’ve swallowed the aftertaste of his skin remains, smoke and sweat and probably the inside of someone else’s mouth.

You try to remember that you hate him.

The first time you saw the fairgrounds fill up, you were stunned by how quickly Henrietta’s delinquent youth population could mobilize, cars pouring in with a steady stream of people clutching bottles and little plastic bags and worse. Then, you were stunned by how many you recognized, Aglionby boys hungry for a thrill, revelling in the illusion of disorder, dressed down to look ripped-up and gaunt like the rest of you. You despise them with every bitter breath you take, that they try squalor on like a costume.

That goes for your friends, too, something you keep quiet about but everyone knows you haven’t forgotten. Their families don’t care, their lives are hard, you all meet up with matching bruises and you know Skov’s got a gold tooth because his father knocked the first one out. You should commiserate; instead, and to your shame, you think about what you would have done in his place. How you could protect yourself if you had their kind of money. At the end of the day, they’re still all rich enough to escape. You don’t doubt they’ll leave you behind.

Kavinsky’s the worst, because he makes a sport of being the worst and he could compete at an Olympic level. You know what he can do. He calls himself a god, and you think it’s not quite a lie. And he is still miserable in Henrietta. You can’t stand it. The only nod he has ever made to self-awareness is an ouroboros tattoo ringing one bicep. You were the first person he showed, and he laughed and laughed, all gleaming teeth and glinting eyes, and you swallowed down the strangest chill when you realized he knew what it meant.

The fairground is teeming in under an hour, and you lose Kavinsky to the crowd. Whatever he gave you is lightning crackling around your neurons, and you feel so awake it becomes surreal, slips back around until your world is more of a lucid dream. It makes it easier to cope with the party when you’re that one step removed, when the noise and the screams and the heady smells of gasoline and liquor are filling the head of someone who’s not quite you.

You stumble up to the edge of the strip, probably in the danger zone of a careless driver, but you find Proko mellow over an unmarked bottle and fall against him to watch the races. Everything happens that little bit too fast for you to follow, the roar of the crowd not quite matching the flickers that you catch. It doesn’t matter, anyway; at that speed, good driving and bad driving look the same to you, right up until the crash.

Most of the pack mocks you for not having your own car, but Kavinsky never has. Possibly, he likes that you don’t have one. He likes that you hate it, that he can force reliance onto you, that he can drive you miles and miles and miles out of town and hold you hostage. It’s the only time you ever really fought him, and the sensation of his head snapping back beneath your fist played out in slow motion. Sometimes when you look at him, you’re distracted by the memory, the sound of his glasses clattering across the dash, his lips and your knuckles both streaked with his blood. Now you just don’t let him drive you further you can walk.

Sometimes you will drive the ones he gives you at night on the strip, because it’s just borrowing, just a few stolen minutes in a thousand kilos of steel. You can hurtle along the track so fast that it seems impossible your problems could still be with you when you finally stop. But it only lasts as long as the road does, and then the world settles back on your shoulders, brittle and finite. You could never take one of these imagined machines home.

You can admire them, though. One day you’ll earn your own.

It takes you too long to realise that the crowd’s sound isn’t synchronised with the noise from the track at all anymore, that no cars are moving but there’s still screaming, primal excitement, the word ‘fight’, Kavinsky’s name. You surge up to your feet, away from Proko and into the throng, still alive with synthetic electricity.

You never step in for Kavinsky in fights. You want him to suffer the consequences of being himself, bloody and well-earned, and he is grossly resilient besides. But you still have to watch; you have to see him survive.

You push through to the front just in time for the impact, a very square punch to the gut knocking him to the ground and he doubles over, wheezing. It’s like you’ve been telling him; he needs to eat more than once a week if he wants his body to keep working. He hauls himself up onto his knees, and whoever he’s offended – some teenage drug lord from the next town over – grabs a handful of his hair and rams their knee into his face. The crunch is audible, and a wince ripples around the crowd.

Kavinsky drops back down, blood streaming from his nose, and you wait for the guy to relent because he got what he wanted; his fists are slick with it. Instead he crashes a foot into Kavinsky’s side. Kavinsky lets out an ugly, rasping groan, the guy pulls back his foot to kick again, and you’re crossing the field without thinking. You get in between them with nothing but the ringing thought that Kavinsky is a god in his own head and breakable in reality, and there is no one else to stop this.

You learned to fight, from all of them. You learned to channel your endless, grinding anger into something real and solid, and you learned how impossibly good it feels to get to hit _back_. Not to your father, still hideously untouchable in his power. But to anyone else, any Aglionby boys who stoop to noticing you and find you lacking, any neighbours who get in your face, anyone who has a problem with Kavinsky and makes the mistake of trying to take it out on you, you retaliate. You are hard-edged and vicious with seventeen years of resentment striking out in precise, brutal blows.

You never hit first, though. It’s something you cling to when you feel you’ve become too lean and jagged and cruel; you do not hit _first_. If that ever changed, you think, you could carve your whole future out in bloody letters.

But for now it’s enough that you can stand in front of a furious man with blown-out pupils and Kavinsky’s blood on his knuckles and know that if he punches you, you can make him hurt, and you can let a little more of the poison in you leak out onto him. It’s gleaming in your eyes, your flexing fingers, how desperately hungry you are for retaliation. Power fantasies and revenge fantasies have become the same thing, and both are shaking in your shoulders.

The guy takes a step back, looking at you like you’re something eldritch. A second later and Skov and Jiang are laying into him, Swan only a moment behind, and the circled onlookers scream their approval, raising whatever’s on-hand to salute the violence. The party floods back in around you, and you’re still only artificially awake, overwhelmed, and you turn to stare down at Kavinsky.

He staggers upright beside you. His shades are broken, and he drops them, cracks the lens under his heel, and smirks at you. You always forget that unshielded, his gaze is too raw for you to really hold, and it strips you away in layers. He says, “Nice, Parrish. Shame you didn’t even get roughed up.” There’s blood between his teeth, and you watch those watery streaks of red. The hollows of his eyes are dangerously deep.

You tell him, “You went down real easy,” because it’s a safe thing to say, because if you can get him defensive then he won’t think about you ready to take a punch to the face on his behalf. You never step in for him in fights. _Intervening_ means fear for him, means dependency. Even if it’s true, you shouldn’t let him know.

But he already knows, and he gives you his scarlet-tinged smile, somehow still intimidating with his nose smashed in. “Didn’t I tell you we’d have fun tonight?” He cuts off any disagreement with a hand on your collar, thumb stroking up your neck, just light enough to make you shudder. His smile is impossibly unkind. He knows far too much about you, and you despise him.

You still lean into the touch, brain over-bright and too worn to do anything else. You chose this, you think, too tired and dizzy to do anything other than shiver against him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I'd love to know what you thought! I also have a [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/).


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